by Adam Thorpe
So Parry was suddenly tired of this crazy widow, crying against the wall. He had closed up out of self-defence. He could not go through that particular door. The crazy white face and its stuck-out tongue had shocked him.
Somewhere outside Luxembourg he had spent a night in a building with the roof blown off and five men from another unit lying dead under canvas in the front hall. Snow blew in through the roof into the upper rooms and through the broken windows into the hall, but the back rooms on the ground floor were untouched. They lit a fire in the hearth that threw wild shadows in the darkness, improvised oil lamps out of shell cases and boiled up some old rooty potatoes that went OK with the dehydrated stew. There was no liquor, because nobody had found any.
There was a piano, however, almost in tune. A couple of handsome German ladies in their middle thirties, well-dressed and firm in the chest, sang a lot of the standards in English and French and then went into the next-door room with some of the men. A fire had been lit there, too. It was the dining room: it had a big oak table with fat legs.
Parry hadn’t gone. He’d stayed with the remaining six or seven men who were too shy or tired or morally upright or militarily obedient or who maybe didn’t like girls and they’d stared into the fire, feeling a mixture of superiority and shame.
They heard noises coming through the wall and door, as if the heavy wallpaper was not enough to cover the truth. Nobody spoke.
All they did was smoke, smoke until their tongues were sore. Some of the men kept grinning and some of the men looked straight ahead into the fire. The kids with spotty faces and anxious eyes, eighteen or nineteen years old, who were very tired and whose time for such things was running on credit, they were restless but they did not move at first. Parry poked the fire and the bits of shattered house timbers spat, bubbling brown paint or lacquer or black creosote, but the noise wasn’t enough to cover over the animal sounds of enjoyment next door.
Not one of them present could play the piano. Not even hymns. Not ‘Chocolate Soldier’ or ‘Good-for-Nothin’ Joe’, even.
Parry had a novel in his pack, but he didn’t fetch it; none of these guys read anything other than comic strips. And Yank, maybe.
‘You don’t make an omelette . . .’ was all one of them said, suddenly and slowly.
Which every man there found so funny he was crying into himself, shaking with it. But even that did not generate a conversation. The noises held them. And maybe the warmth of the fire, which was endlessly fascinating and better than a movie or a top baseball game. The air was very thick.
Gradually, one by one, the other guys crept away. They got up one by one without saying a word and slipped through the door into the dining room. Each time the door opened the sounds grew louder for a moment, fanning the lust of the men left behind. Maybe they went only to watch; Parry didn’t know. And then he was the only one left. The last little Indian.
The fire burned on, giving out a good heat and a soft light. He sat in a comfortable easy chair with lacy stuff on its arms and watched the flames chew and grind away at the shattered timbers. There were thumps and muffled cries, but he was above all that. Part of him – about a third, he reckoned – was eager to get up and see what was happening next door in the dining room with the big oak table. Maybe that’s where it was all happening, on the big oak table. He imagined it as being serious and concentrated. The two thirds remaining in him sat it out, gaining amazing pleasure from the comfortable chair and the heat from the fire and the flames themselves, tamely blazing in the fine marble hearth.
He went to sleep like that.
When he woke up it was morning. He was cold. There was no one else in the room. The door into the dining room was closed. He didn’t want to open it, to have everyone stirring and staring at him.
He went into the hall instead. The five dead men were still under canvas, their boots poking up from one end. He looked out into the wide street. There was a smell of burning and explosives, but otherwise all was quiet. The ruined houses softened with light snow and the upright houses looking peaceful.
One of their trucks went by, empty; then another going the opposite way, slowly, this one full of men swaying under the canvas. He acknowledged them with a humorous salute, though he didn’t know them and not just because they were Brits. They raised their hands and shouted things he mostly didn’t catch, but which were nice and friendly in a British accent.
‘Wotcher, cock!’
‘Which way’d they go, mate?’
‘Hard luck! Yer’ve missed it!’
‘Stand back, mates! It’s the Yanks!’
He felt good, not succumbing to the German ladies: he felt very clean in the crisp morning air.
He watched the truck go up the street, feeling a whole lot better after a night’s sleep in the chair. Then the truck lifted up and something clapped, like a huge sail clapping in the wind next to his ear. The truck blossomed into fire, a ball of fire that turned tulip-shaped and dark and folded over into black smoke rolling up the street towards him.
He ran towards the burning truck, but the heat and smoke made him turn back. Some of the guys who had enjoyed themselves in the dining room appeared in front of the house, buttoning their pants or tunics, looking anxious.
Parry told them that the truck had hit a mine, that the bastard Heinies had mined the street before leaving. The smoke was moving quietly through the sky and the truck kept on burning, the canvas top shredding away in scraps like golden butterflies. No one had leapt or fallen out: they just burned like dolls.
Then he saw one man ablaze because he had leapt down and he was walking for a few yards and Parry was sick of that kind of thing. The man knelt down, still burning at the neck.
The two German ladies appeared at the door, looking tired, holding their collars close to their throats. The men with Parry turned to them and grabbed them by the hair and threw them into the snow, where they floundered like dying fish. Apparently they’d said last night there were no mines set around here, that the only mines were themselves, full of dynamite.
Perhaps they didn’t know – why should they have known? – but the men were disgusted by them now and kicked them hard as the black smoke billowed down the street and then they shot high after them as they screamed, stumbling off through the snow.
Parry hadn’t felt this disgust, and he’d known why.
But now he felt for the widow a little part of what the men had felt for the two German whores. She was just standing by the charcoal scribbles on the gable end and clawing her mouth with her fingers, turning even crazier. He might have crossed out the stick drawing of the kids, to see how she reacted, but he couldn’t risk it. She was grieving for her kids, not her husband.
The face with the tongue had not come back.
In any case, he was not going to get involved. He was going to stay in the next-door room in front of the fire. He was not going to listen to her cries.
My heartbeat tells me that I’m alive. It continues. It goes on and on, without reflection. What makes it go on and on? It does not stop when you order it to. How strange. The good news is that I think I am going to see you all very soon! I am safe. This is because I am living in a kind of death. It is easier to stay alive when you are not trying so hard; no one notices you, then. Now it doesn’t matter if I am noticed. I am visible, but I have never felt so small and unnoticed. I am waiting for you. Then we [ . . . ?]
41
Herr Hoffer coughed in the dust and decided his inspection of the attics was over. The third attic stretched beyond the darkness but it was evident that there was nothing ablaze or even smouldering. What could he do if it was? Very little.
He did not even have a helmet.
He made his way back to the steps, feeling vulnerable. His legs and back ached and he yawned and felt tiredness surround him as if he had fallen into a huge suffocating flower. Tiredness would always do this to him and his thoughts would go jumbled as if he was falling asleep although he was still upright and busy
. It was almost warm, up here, with the April sun on the roof tiles and all this wood and all he wanted to do was lie down and sleep long and dream of happier days, days spent in summer barns full of hay, the dust lit by bright golden shafts of sun as fine as sword-blades, eggs hunted for in the nooks and crannies, eggs warm with life, summer days of barns and rivers and summer nights crowded with stars. He was crouching at the low door above the steps when there was a dull thud on his head, although he actually heard it as a wash of water or liquid glass and then the silence rang in blackness that was a falling sensation he was trying to get a grip on. This was, in fact, the moment of coming to after centuries of unconsciousness when his body was swaying on springs. He had a memory from childhood of falling and getting up again in long summery grass that rustled, too tall to see over. His mother was calling him. She couldn’t see him. He had to call her, and he was trying to call her from within the grass but his voice wasn’t very strong. it had something stuck in it. He tried harder. He was shouting for his mother as a grown man – he woke himself up with it. He stopped shouting for her, feeling sick and giddy. There was disorder around him, he knew that. He had no idea where he was. There was a lot of daylight filtering through whirls of smoke or dust. The noise had been too much for his head and he had fallen asleep and tumbled down and somehow flown up again to where he was before. There were diagonals, thick as trees, as if he was lying in an ancient forest where the trees had fallen upon each other. There was a warmth flowing over his face, which he touched. It was dark blood. This surprised him. His hair was full of it, making sticky clumps. He had been wounded in battle. A sabre had descended upon his skull. Wielded by a Frenchman. Now an SA man’s huge, close-shaven head was butting him just above the forehead. He could not persuade the SA man to stop, because he could not see the face, only the shaven skull. He felt an oppressive weight over his eyes, like bone, like a primitive cave-dweller in pictures. He shifted his legs, being careful not to squash the mushrooms of Moholy-Nagy. Didn’t Moholy-Nagy end up as a Bauhaus professor? Probably. He cut his chair legs shorter for firewood; it was not art after all. Who visited him and thought it was art? Schwitters, or Schlemmer? Wuppertal, or Norway? Or neither. Norway is at least cold. Then he passed out again.
42
A 17-pound high-velocity shell from an American 76-mm field gun positioned behind an improvised ‘V’ of corrugated-iron fencing in an apple orchard on the western edge of town had grazed the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum’s tower on one side and exploded, the violence of the blast sending blocks of masonry from the upper tower onto the roof below, which gave way in places under the weight of the falling material but was not set alight. A bang and a quiver were felt by those in the vaults, and Herr Wolmer’s tiny mirror embedded in a view of the famous Alpine lake of Konigssee fell off its hook and shattered, scattering its silvery confetti over the janitor’s legs.
About twenty minutes earlier, on the other side of town, a shell had struck the stone facing of the Hoffers’ apartment block and fallen into the street, cracking the tarmac.
The shell did not immediately ignite, but bounced and rolled wildly until it came to rest against the knee-high wall, topped by iron railings, which enclosed the thin strip of garden separating the Hoffers’ block from the street. Another high-explosive shell from a Waffen-SS field gun in Schulstrasse fell short a few seconds later and penetrated the roof of the block next door, exploding inside and starting a fire. The vibrations of this impact touched off the faulty shell lying on the street, disintegrating the wall, twisting the railings like liquorice and causing a percussive wave to proceed right through the apartment block – experienced by the people in its air-raid cellar as both heat and pressure as well as noise. Apart from severely damaging the façade and blowing out windows, the blast caused ceilings and walls to collapse in the front half of the building. The considerable amount of rubble that even one inside wall creates, when no longer flat and smooth and upright but reduced to a chaos of its constituent parts, made its way down the stairs to the cellar in a fog of dust and rested against the door.
The people inside, who included Erika and Elisabeth Hoffer, were trapped.
What is more, the blast had shorted the apartment block’s electrical circuitry and burst several pipes in the hot water system. Steam joined the dust in the air as boiling water began to flood the rooms with a hiss and a noise like many fountains. The people down in the cellar were screaming in the pitch blackness. They carried on screaming even when someone switched on their torch. Frau Hoffer’s two small daughters were also screaming. They needed their mother, but their mother had gone upstairs to fetch a toy rabbit at the insistence of little Erika. Erika had left her cuddly toy tucked up in her bed, its floppy ears spread nicely out on the bolster, the sheet folded back just under the leather nose. She needed its smell and its woolly touch against her cheek and mouth. She could not suck her thumb without its floppy ear squeezed between her second and third fingers. In the darkness of the shelter, she could not breathe without her woolly rabbit, so Frau Hoffer had run up to their apartment to fetch it.
At the very moment Herr Hoffer was being threatened with Herr Wolmer’s rifle in the janitor’s room, his wife was being blown off her feet in the back bedroom and his daughters were screaming in fear.
The cellar had started to fill with steam and smoke and dust alarmingly quickly, probably by way of the air vents. The stronger people present flung themselves at the metal door (toughened with steel plate and rivets in 1942 by order of the city area’s Zellenleiter), which had been dislodged slightly, but could not open it further against the rubble piled up on the other side. The situation was made worse, if anything, by the fitful light from the rubber torch cast on terrified faces. People coughed and held handkerchiefs over their mouths. Some continued to push against the door or started scraping at the brick walls of the shelter with any instruments to hand – even, in one case, a nail file, which made surprising inroads on the damp-softened cement joints. A neighbour, a childless widow, held the Hoffer children tight against her, like the other mothers and grandmothers with their children, and told them to stop crying, everything would be alright. Erika and Elisabeth buried their faces in her dress, their plaits hanging down like tassels beneath her breasts, and wept and coughed and cried out for their mother. A Panzer tank passing in the street above (along which the two girls would normally have walked to school this morning) burst through the flames and, after continuing a little way with smoke twirling from its turret, summarily exploded. Lohenfelde was falling to the Allies.
43
He’d had no news of his brother or of his 95-year-old grandmother in Eberbach, now in the hands of the Americans. Or of his sister, who persisted in staying in Berlin. Two cousins had been killed in action, plus a spinster aunt in the bombing of Dortmund; his sister-in-law, Lotte – five years younger than Sabine – had been evacuated to Bavaria from Stuttgart. But, unlike Sabine’s small family, the Hoffers were a large tribe, well spread out, though their spiritual heart was in a lost village in the Sauerland. It might have been better had they stayed in clogs, turning the earth between the hills and forests. But they hadn’t.
His grandfather, a bright fellow who had served under Prince Kraft of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen as a liaison officer during the 1870 war, became the village schoolteacher and married the strapping postmistress. His father became a teacher in turn – in a Catholic grammar school in Eberbach, where he stayed until his retirement. His mother, who owned and ran a smart hat shop, was never very well after her youngest son’s birth, and took to her bed for long periods, reading magazines and coloured catalogues from large stores while Heinrich played around her. The hat shop closed and there were money worries. His father was stern and religious with very conservative views, but not unloving. He had a lot to cope with, including three children separated each from the other by eight years, of whom Heinrich was the youngest. Heinrich was sickly as a child, with stomach problems arising, it was thought, from anxiety at his
mother’s poorly state.
Little Heinrich was frequently bullied at school, for being plump as well as being the son of the headmaster (who beat the boys vigorously, although he was never violent at home). His mother faded away in his twelfth year and, immediately after the funeral, his stomach problems converted into a mental restlessness which surfaced either as migraine or a compulsion to go for long, solitary hikes in the woods around Eberbach. His schoolwork deteriorated along with his eyesight, and he developed huge sties his schoolmates found both repellent and amusing. He was not cured by a Wandervogel summer camp of long marches and evening guitar-playing and extracts from the works of Professors Waitz, Maurer and Treitsche on the early and uncorrupted German tribes and the awfulness of Sodom (France). In fact (rather ironically), he was sexually molested by two of the older boys (quite normal, they told him) and came back home feeling dirty and full of sin. He only discovered himself a year later when, at fourteen, he found – quite by chance in the school library – a book on the French Impressionists, with coloured illustrations pasted in on grey card. It was as though a window in a dim place had opened onto sunlight. Then followed a passion for Brueghel through a similar book. He would pore over it for hours, his eye travelling so deeply into each peopled landscape that sometimes he would think himself back there in that time, a Flemish peasant of the sixteenth century, and wake up as if from a trance.
It was as one of those peasants, lying sprawled in a field during harvest with a flagon of beer beside him to quench his thirst, that Herr Hoffer imagined himself before properly coming to after the attics had been struck by falling masonry. Everything was a cadmium yellow. His leather cod-piece was warm in the sun. The old times before trains and cars and bombs lay generously around him. Horses snorted. Dogs barked. Flanders lay passive and replete under the August heat. Then he came to and saw a thick oaken beam with wooden pegs in it and the tiny bore-holes of worm. He knew without a doubt, as if his thoughts were etched on glass, that he was in the attics of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Lohenfelde, and that they had been damaged by a shell.
